I thought I would summarise, briefly the technologies we are using on this course. After all, we are “extending” an online course. How are we doing it?

We start with Google Applications or Google Apps for short. Particularly we are using Google Apps for Education as provided by Oxford Brookes University. This provides us with the main framework for the principal course site. Google Apps also provides Google Docs, which we used for collaborative writing in the Social Citation Exercise. Google Docs has been the environment in which the course has been drafted and in which the transcripts for the audio are written before being pasted into the site. Google Apps also provides Spreadsheets and Forms. Forms allow us to collect data such as your profile information and to conduct the survey into your social media tool kit. The final piece of Google “kit” we are using is a “Gadget” called RSSReader+. Strictly, this is not Google kit, but an approved third party extension available through the wide community of independent developers who write little bits of code that are useful and make them available through the Google Gadget “ecosystem”. Ajax Gaier wrote RSSReader+. This gadget enables us to display a stream of RSS feeds – in this case four different Twitter searches on the home page of the course site.

So, we are using Twitter for the course, too, primarily as a way of collaboratively sharing links to items which the course participants and tutors discover in their Twitter communities. To focus our attention we use the convention of “hash tagging” using the tag #eyolc for extending your online course. But, we also use Twitter for occasional social commentary on the course and how it is going, and to draw attention to the existence of the course itself through our various networks, which follow us on Twitter.

From Twitter we also pull feeds into the paper.li Extending Your Online Course “weekly paper”. And we are using the Archivist as an aggregator for the #eyolc tweets which shows the frequency of communication and other Twitter stats.

We are using WordPress for this blog, in an installation of the software called BrookesBlogs hosted on servers which we maintain for the purposes of archiving two JISC support and synthesis projects.

We use Audacity to record audio commentary and we use AudioBoo to upload, host and embed the audio streams on the site.

Two tools that are not being used, but should be by my reckoning, are Bibsonomy, or some other social bookmarking tool for sharing links in a more structured way than provided for by Twitter, and Zotero or some other social citation tool for sharing full bibliographic citations and reading lists.

p@c Said,

I have extracted from the individual guides from the lunchtime sessions on Web 2 and learning, the lists of potential learning activities, and examples where available, plus a couple of updates into a single document. I have linked it to a posting in this week’s discussion in the eyolc course but also added it to the top of the list of guides on the wiki. Hope it proves useful.
–p@ c